The November Man
Somehow, it’s easy to lower your expectations in August, and a film that would seem stale and dated in, say, May or even November, can feel almost like a relief. The November Man is one of those movies.
Its lack of digital wizardry – relying, as it does, on old fashioned practical effects – feels like a welcome respite from the summer’s FX bombast. And though this agent-thinks-he’s-out-but-gets-pulled-back-in tale brings very little new to the table, at least it isn’t If I Stay. Or Sin City 2. Or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Oh, August.
At first blush, the film appears to be a James Bond rip off, right down to the lead and his lady (Pierce Brosnan and Quantum of Solace Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko). But this film casts off any interest in smooth, sly espionage, gadgetry, one-liners and one night stands in favor of something a little more brutish.
Brosnan’s ex CIA op retires not long after an incident with a trainee he deems unfit for service. But when a colleague needs a favor and pulls him back in for one last gig…well, when does that ever go as planned? Next thing you know, he’s trying to figure out what went wrong with his op while he plays cat and mouse with that old trainee, now a trained CIA sniper with bigger ambitions.
Brosnan’s grizzled charm buoys the effort, even when he’s pursing his lips like a school marm at his former trainee (a mostly serviceable Luke Bracey). The film falters most in its dual purposes: mentor/mentee cat and mouse versus international conspiracy leading to a puppet Russian president with a pension for under aged war refugees.
The truth is, neither side is especially compelling on its own, and when the two blur together, things feel just silly.
Still, The November Man isn’t bad. It’s no Skyfall – the new high water mark for spy movies – but it’s no Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, either. Remember that one? From January of this year? Yeah, January is another one of those bad movie months. At least in August the bad movies don’t come with snow.
As Above, So Below
A friend of mine went to Paris for her honeymoon, convincing her husband to tour the catacombs beneath the city while there. It’s a creepy, claustrophobic destination for most anyone. He’s uninterested in the macabre, and he’s 6’4”. It was a tight fit.
I thought of him frequently during As Above, So Below because, if there’s one thing the film does effectively, it is tap your claustrophobic dread.
Scarlett, an Indiana Jones type, believes a stone that A) turns any metal into gold, and B) grants eternal life, is hidden beneath Paris. She lures a documentarian, an old boyfriend, and a team of Parisian catacomb explorers to help her finish the quest that killed her father. All told, it’s a weirdly young, attractive, hyper-intelligent group of explorers.
Obviously, co-writer/director John Erick Dowdle (Quarantine) owes the Jones franchise a pretty big debt. He’s equally indebted to Neil Marshall’s 2005 horror classic The Descent, and he robs here and there from his own Quarantine, the Julia Roberts/Keiffer Sutherland debacle Flatliners, and the Nicolas Cage ridiculousness National Treasure. A weird mix, that, but there are moments when it works.
The one thing Dowdle does well is develop a rising terror of confinement – a knack he proved with Quarantine. He loses his footing when it comes to intermittent scares, and the film just doesn’t build to enough of a climax.
The set up takes too long and there’s not enough terror to distract you from the fairly ludicrous quest underway. The spooky images are few and far between, with Dowdle relying too heavily on the whiz and whir of handheld cameras and distorted sounds to carry the load his imagination couldn’t.
It doesn’t make the film entirely unsatisfying. The claustrophobic among us, in particular, will be put through the ringer. But Dowdle and crew can’t quite piece together enough quality moments to deliver a memorable chiller.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-KIzzF3S0o
Ivory Tower
Enough about your school’s football team.
Do you have a climbing wall? Swimming pool for the luxury dorm?
If not, then your school is just not keeping up with the competitive college atmosphere illustrated in Ivory Tower, an effective documentary on the skyrocketing cost of higher education.
Utilizing interviews, archival footage and statistical graphics, writer/director Andrew Rossi does a masterful job illustrating how alarming the situation has become, and why.
He hits you early with some sobering numbers. Since 1978, college tuition has increased more than any other good or service in the United States, leading to a total amount of student loan debt that has now topped one trillion dollars. Yes, with a “t”.
Rossi then makes a strong and seemingly fair-minded case that the entire system is nearing a point of collapse, driven by the schools’ relentless “pursuit of prestige” and the Reagan-era reclassification of students as consumers.
To illustrate both points, we get a close look at New York City’s Cooper Union, founded in the 1850s on the promise that education should always be free. When a new President proposes reneging on that promise and the students revolt, there is an unexpected rise in the dramatic heft of the film.
As he did so effectively in Page One: Inside the New York Times, Rossi lets us feel part of a movement, and the result is an engrossing documentary-within-a-documentary.
Final sequences on the student loan industry and online education are informative, but seem a bit anti-climactic, merely adding to the list of problems without any proposed solutions.
The underlying premise of Ivory Tower is the debate over whether or not a college education is still worth the cost. Though the film cops out a bit on the final answer, it serves as a vital prerequisite to fully understanding the question.
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Photo credit: AP Photo/Relativity Media, Aleksandar Letic